Bob Kerr: RI veteran David Slone is writing the next chapter in his extraordinary life

Sunday

Aug 4, 2013 at 12:01 AM

People in the Plum Beach neighborhood of Saunderstown are talking about just who those characters are in David Slone’s book.

By Bob Kerr

People in the Plum Beach neighborhood of Saunderstown are talking about just who those characters are in David Slone’s book. Neighbors have asked Slone, “Is that me?” My friend Tony DeLuca is pretty sure he’s on page 153 in the person of one Vincent Scolari, who, writes Slone, is “a retired state legislator and high school math teacher. He is an honest, self-deprecating, wonderfully likeable man.”

That’s Tony all right, and there are others drawn from this tight little village on a hillside.

“I have this place where I live,” says Slone. “People here have been very good to me.”

So when he wrote “Rose Beach” he drew on Plum Beach. He drew on his Parkinson’s disease. He drew on Vietnam. And every night, his wife, Stephanie, read what he had written that day, and they talked about it.

“I would ask her, ‘would a woman say it this way?’” Slone says.

He wrote the novel from a woman’s point of view. The main character is Helen Barton, returning with her ailing husband, Zeke, to Rose Beach for a last summer before selling their cottage and moving to Florida. Old secrets, old relationships come back and threaten to undo a life built up over 60 years of marriage.

It is a good novel, filled with the uneasy accommodations families make to keep from coming apart. It is probably even better if you live in Plum Beach and wonder if that’s you walking into the story on page 76.

It is not Slone’s first. He wrote “The Man Left Behind” in the midst of a hard time coming to terms with things too long kept inside.

“When I got the Parkinson’s diagnosis, I went to the VA to talk about my experiences. I was crying a lot, wondering if there was any hope. I started seeing a psychiatrist.”

There was anger, he found, and survivor’s guilt.

Writing about it helped. But after writing “The Man Left Behind” online, he pulled it back.

“It wasn’t an honest book.”

Now he has “Rose Beach” behind him and moves on to the next book. But it is difficult to know if any book can match Slone’s own story.

The new project is a post-Vietnam book, and Slone will write it one-handed.

“My left hand is basically shot,” he says, citing one of the things taken by Parkinson’s.

“I have to hunt and peck.”

And he will make the letters on his computer screen as big as he can, because in May he woke up blind.

“One day I woke up and I couldn’t see. There were lesions on my eyes.”

He has some peripheral vision, but he can see almost nothing looking straight ahead. He can’t read. He was unable to read “Rose Beach” when it was published.

Still, he will write. He will work around things.

“Blindness is a challenge,” he says, “and I accept the challenge.”

We sit in a wonderful light-filled room where his photographs, taken in and around Plum Beach, line the walls. He has published two books of his photography.

He shows me a picture from 1969 of his six-man Ranger recon team from the Army’s 75{+t}{+h} Infantry. They are standing outside a hooch in Quang Tri. It is an old Marine hooch that I might have hung around at some point.

“I was Airborne. I always wanted to be with the best. I felt I was part of an elite group.”

He was born in Alaska, one of 15 children, and he grew up in North Dakota. He volunteered for the draft coming out of high school. He was a Vietnam veteran at 19.

And he is the only member of his recon team to survive an ambush in the DMZ.

He spent three weeks in the hospital, then went back to a new team.

“I was 19 when I got home. I was angry. I went right to college. I was a Vietnam veteran and I couldn’t drink.”

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communications at the University of North Dakota. He went into hospital fundraising, which is what brought him to Rhode Island and Rhode Island Hospital.

“That’s what I did for 40 years.”

He met Stephanie in Newport seven years ago. She is a physician’s assistant in plastic surgery at Rhode Island Hospital.

When he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, it meant a 100-percent service-related disability because of the connection of the disease to Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant used in Vietnam.

“The VA has been very good to me,” he says.

He is a big man, used to hard physical activity.

“But the Parkinson’s is devastating,” he says. “You feel you let yourself down.”

So he adjusts. He needs to write because writing is a way of dealing with the kind of setbacks that could well leave a man doing not much of anything. He works the right hand hard and focuses what little eyesight he has on putting the words together.

“I was not going to go into the bunker,” he says.

So far, his only appearance in support of “Rose Beach” has been at the Plum Beach book club. It was well received.

The book can be ordered through amazon.com.

David Slone’s next book, the post-Vietnam book, will more closely touch on the amazing story of its author.